![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
If you're on Twitter (or even if you're not) and you're interested in space stuff, checkout Twitter users MarsPhoenix and STS124. MarsPhoenix is a "first-person voice" twittering written as if by the Mars lander. Pretty cool... little 140-character-or-less snippets about a lander's day on Mars. STS124 is, unsurprisingly, a Twitter feed about the space shuttle. It's a little more "newsy" and less personal, but it frequently has things like links to the live video of the spacewalk, which is a pretty cool way to keep up with the cool stuff! (If you're a Twitter user, I'm there too... username tollers, just like here.)
Closings are scheduled! (At least mostly...) I close on the current house at 11 a.m. on June 18th. Closing on the new house is set for June 20th, time TBD. The seller has seven days to get out, then I start moving in. I have 30 days to be out of my house, nine of which are eaten up by the two days between closings and the seven I'm giving her. Ugh. The PackRat should be here by Monday, so I can start the really serious packing.
I'm discovering that tiny towns are all kinds of entertaining. The town that I'm moving to has a population of just over 2500 people. The lady I'm buying the house from has dial-up AOL, so she had no clue about broadband availability, so I started looking. I found a wireless provider (not terribly fast, but highly available), and Verizon's DSL, but I couldn't find a cable provider listed anywhere. I had a few other "new-to-town" questions that I needed answered, so I went looking for the Chamber of Commerce. Heh. No such thing in TinyLittleTown. Finally, I called the number listed simply as Town Hall. Bingo. Got a nice lady who told me that the town runs the utility company, so that same number is now stored for when I transfer the electricity, gave me the name of the local cable/broadband provider, told me which cell phone providers have the best coverage and just generally did all the "welcome to TinyLittleTown" things. (Finally ended up going w/ Verizon DSL after all... they offer twice the download speed and three times the upload of either the cable or wireless providers, assuming the line checks out when they test it.)
Speaking of TinyLittleTown... it's far enough off the beaten track that I have no TMobile coverage there, so after years of being with OmniPoint/VoiceStream/TMobile, I'm going to be forced to change cell phone providers. Eep! I like TMobile. I get actual tech support from them. Last time I went to Aruba, they'd just provisioned a reciprocal agreement w/ the local wireless carrier and hadn't tested it. I ended up w/ about $50 in credit, plus all my calls for free while I was there, just for being their designated guinea pig. And when we moved into our current offices and I had crappy reception, I called them, told them I could see the tower from the office, but only had two bars on a good day, and promptly ended up talking to engineering. Less than a week later, an engineer called me back and asked how it was working... turns out he was calling from the tower and wanted to make sure the dead spot was fixed before he left. It was. Full signal. Yay.
So while I'm not happy about leaving TMobile, and having had notoriously awful service from AT&T in the past, I find myself in the position of considering AT&T because (a) the nice lady in TinyLittleTown says they have the best coverage and (b) I really want an iPhone and they're still AT&T-only. So now I'm waiting to see what Apple announces about a possible new iPhone on Monday at WWDC, then I get to see if I have better luck w/ AT&T than I had the last time I dealt with them.
The cats have figured out that Something Is Up. The abundance of boxes, and things that keep moving around or disappearing, has them all just slightly off kilter. It's going to be interesting to see how they all react when they get put in the Evil Cat Carriers and hauled away to a strange house. Hopefully the giant screened porch will be fascinating enough that they won't be too freaked out!
Closings are scheduled! (At least mostly...) I close on the current house at 11 a.m. on June 18th. Closing on the new house is set for June 20th, time TBD. The seller has seven days to get out, then I start moving in. I have 30 days to be out of my house, nine of which are eaten up by the two days between closings and the seven I'm giving her. Ugh. The PackRat should be here by Monday, so I can start the really serious packing.
I'm discovering that tiny towns are all kinds of entertaining. The town that I'm moving to has a population of just over 2500 people. The lady I'm buying the house from has dial-up AOL, so she had no clue about broadband availability, so I started looking. I found a wireless provider (not terribly fast, but highly available), and Verizon's DSL, but I couldn't find a cable provider listed anywhere. I had a few other "new-to-town" questions that I needed answered, so I went looking for the Chamber of Commerce. Heh. No such thing in TinyLittleTown. Finally, I called the number listed simply as Town Hall. Bingo. Got a nice lady who told me that the town runs the utility company, so that same number is now stored for when I transfer the electricity, gave me the name of the local cable/broadband provider, told me which cell phone providers have the best coverage and just generally did all the "welcome to TinyLittleTown" things. (Finally ended up going w/ Verizon DSL after all... they offer twice the download speed and three times the upload of either the cable or wireless providers, assuming the line checks out when they test it.)
Speaking of TinyLittleTown... it's far enough off the beaten track that I have no TMobile coverage there, so after years of being with OmniPoint/VoiceStream/TMobile, I'm going to be forced to change cell phone providers. Eep! I like TMobile. I get actual tech support from them. Last time I went to Aruba, they'd just provisioned a reciprocal agreement w/ the local wireless carrier and hadn't tested it. I ended up w/ about $50 in credit, plus all my calls for free while I was there, just for being their designated guinea pig. And when we moved into our current offices and I had crappy reception, I called them, told them I could see the tower from the office, but only had two bars on a good day, and promptly ended up talking to engineering. Less than a week later, an engineer called me back and asked how it was working... turns out he was calling from the tower and wanted to make sure the dead spot was fixed before he left. It was. Full signal. Yay.
So while I'm not happy about leaving TMobile, and having had notoriously awful service from AT&T in the past, I find myself in the position of considering AT&T because (a) the nice lady in TinyLittleTown says they have the best coverage and (b) I really want an iPhone and they're still AT&T-only. So now I'm waiting to see what Apple announces about a possible new iPhone on Monday at WWDC, then I get to see if I have better luck w/ AT&T than I had the last time I dealt with them.
The cats have figured out that Something Is Up. The abundance of boxes, and things that keep moving around or disappearing, has them all just slightly off kilter. It's going to be interesting to see how they all react when they get put in the Evil Cat Carriers and hauled away to a strange house. Hopefully the giant screened porch will be fascinating enough that they won't be too freaked out!
Tags:
